Ruth Brown

This Little Girl's Gone Rockin'

Ruth Brown

This Little Girl's Gone Rockin'

Ruth Brown acutely felt the changing times at Atlantic Records. She had been there since the label’s inauspicious launch, but saw that her champion, Herb Abramson, was sidelined and would soon be bought out. She didn’t get along as well with his replacement, Jerry Wexler, and felt that the label’s co-founder, Ahmet Ertegun, was becoming remote. One of the artists assigned to Herb Abramson was Bobby Darin, and it took some time for Abramson or anyone at Atlantic to know what to do with him. For Ruth, it was unusual enough just seeing a white performer on the label.

"I often came across him in the studio, trying out little things,” she wrote in her autobiography. “’I hear you’re a songwriter,’ I jived him one day. ‘Why don’t you write me a song?’ He did. It was ‘This Little Girl’s Gone Rockin’,’ and it was produced by two other ex-Brillers, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.” Most sources credit Wexler and Ertegun as A&R men on the session, but Ruth clearly remembers it differently.

A straightforward boogie woogie underpinned by Stoller on piano, it was highlighted by Everett Barksdale on guitar and the always distinctive King Curtis on tenor sax. Ruth damns it with faint praise in her autobiography, but it became her last major pop hit and one of her last R&B hits. Darin’s co-writer, incidentally, was Emanuel Kurtz aka Mann Curtis, who had begun cranking out songs in the early 1940s, and wrote the English words to Let It Be Me. Ruth’s long chart career was winding down, although she performs to this day. Darin’s other contribution to Ruth’s tenure at Atlantic was to advise her to audit the label for unpaid royalties.